NVIDIA announces cost, energy-saving Tesla Personal Supercomputer
By Donald Melanson 
posted November 18th 2008 12:27PM
posted November 18th 2008 12:27PM
AMD has already outlined its plans to harness the power of its GPUs for some added computing muscle, and it looks like NVIDIA is now taking things one step further by announcing its new GPU-based Tesla Personal Supercomputer, which promises to deliver the power of a traditional supercomputer cluster at 1/100th of the price. That "personal supercomputer" is actually a platform based on NVIDIA's new Tesla C1060 GPU Computing Processor, which itself is based on NVIDIA's CUDA parallel computing architecture. The supercomputers themselves will come from a whole host of manufacturers that have already partnered with NVIDIA, including ASUS, Dell, Lenovo, and a number of more specialized computer makers. While complete details on those systems are still a bit light at the moment, they'll apparently be "priced like a conventional PC workstation," and the first few out of the gate should be available starting today.
Available starting today??? And we still don't know anything about it?
Isn't is what Apple already... nah, just kidding :)
Am I the only one who saw this picture and thought of GlaDos saying something like "When you complete this chamber you will be dead, and then there will be cake."?
Well if it's a choice between cake and death, I'll take the cake.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNjcuZ-LiSY
yeah but you cant eat it too. Turns out it was poisonous.
Ok, so what the hell runs on it? What O/S? I know Windows or any basic *nix OS will run on it. Would be nice though if they did..
** will NOT run on it. Sorry,, typed too fast.
Windows and Linux are both supported. These machines are basically fast desktop workstations with oversized nvidia gpus that are optimized for computation rather than graphics.
+1 to the first person that makes a Tesla coil case mod for one of these.
What every computer needs, a static discharge rod next to delicate electronics.
And there I was going to ask if it could play Red Alert 3.
I'll get my coat.
ummm, anyone found/priced one of these yet?
What OS are they using?
nevermind, check this out:
http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/insideit/archive/2008/11/18/your-hidden-supercomputer.aspx
It's the applications that will need to be coded for the GPU's, not necessarily the OS' themselves...
I should have known that. duh.
Thanks for finding that, I was under the impression that CUDA was enabled through the drivers and that was it, I didn't know the application itself had to be coded for CUDA support.
Will it run XBMC or Crysis?
Can Engadget please prevent all posts with the word Crysis, Doom, blend and overlord in it? Apart from this one, obviously.
I would suggest to add some ..
e.g. : "copy of the iPhone's xxxxxxxxxx" or "some much like the iPhone's xxxxxx" or "the iPhone already does this"..
Especially when it comes from people who don't know what a MMS is and think photo sharing on mobile was invented by steve Jobs.
(I'm not totally sure you can actually track that but ask google, they know what color are my pants so ...)
Great minds think alike. This could be another revolutionary step for Folding like the PS3 client before it if the real thing lives up to the marketing.
Bah, in my humble opinion (as the success of netbooks demonstrated) there is already available all the computing power the average geek is ever gonna need; what's sorely lacking are the apps and programs to exploit and take advantage of that power.
Vista (for exemple) seems explicitely designed to waste as much computing power as possible.
This kind of machine could be useful only to heavy coders or for special professional needs unless some future boy-genius/soon-to-be-billionaire will manage to write TEH killer app for this toy.
Until then, betterment in citizens' computing experiences will keep marching in step with Moore's law inflexible rythm.
Quantum leaps are rarely seen in computing industry, and this does notseem to be one of those.
Well may you should start work on a super computer powered spell checking program. A grammar check probably wouldn't hurt while you're at it.
"Bah, in my humble opinion (as the success of netbooks demonstrated) there is already available all the computing power the average geek is ever gonna need"
And no one will ever need more than 640Kb RAM
@Kal326
Maybe you should need a supercomuter to figure out aproximately how idiot (and boring) you really are.
But probably such a task is byond the possibility even of the most advanced SC clusters.
Maybe now is the time to pitch the idea of an open source Dwarf Fortress server on one of these... mmm, massive kitten death towers.
You would think that after all the "will it play crysis?" issues you would realize that computing power usage will always be pushed by the human imagination. These computers can probably be used for things you cant fathom. In the present maybe most people cant. But its like cell phones. Did you ever imagine everything that cell phones would be capable of now? Were you asking "Why are we putting faster processors in phones if all we need to do is make phone calls?" back in the 90's... Or "Why put a camera on a phone if I already have a digital camera?" .
This is good news! Love it!
Also like to donate some power to SETI@home http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/
I expect this to be a MacPro Option in January. Nvidia and Apple are really good friends now. And don't forget Adobe and Nvidia.
Will it play Crysis on High Details? Or maybe Crysis 2 on Low Details?
So who wins?
Tesla, or Helmer ( http://helmer.sfe.se/ ) ?
Very interesting, can't wait to see full reviews of these.
Their gpu only does 1TFLOP, with the 4870 doing 1.4 TFLOPS. If you are just doing folding@home you might as well just get some 48xx ranging from 1/11the the price of the latest tesla for 1 TFLOP to 1/5th for 2.4 TFLOPS (more than 2x the performance using the 4870x2).
What about using the GPUs as a renderfarm? Would the software have to be ported to this CUDA language first?